Exploration

I have two coding projects going, and both are for the moment stalled. Maybe you can help.

The more recent of the two is WP-Gatekeeper, which is almost ready to go from RC1 to RC2 except for one tiny little problem: I upgraded my local copy of MySQL, and it blew away my WordPress database. So I mysqldumped the database from meyerweb.com, copied it down to my hard drive, and tried to mysqlimport it. And tried, and tried, and tried, until eventually my eyes started bleeding. No dice. Therefore, no possible chance of my testing the update script, which is necessary because it actually deletes tables from the 1.0b1 version of Gatekeeper. I don’t want to put it out into the wild without making sure that it deletes the right tables, and no others.

Obviously, without a successful import of the dump file, I can’t test the script. I’ve read the MySQL documentation, and done everything it says to do. It fails. I tried logical variants, in case there was something the documentation was leaving out. No dice. Then I tried illogical variants, including some SQL statements that included words I wouldn’t ordinarily type, let alone say out loud. The error message is basically always the same, and it never helps. It goes something like this:

Well, no kidding, geniuses; there is no table called that, because it’s the name of the dump file, not anything in the database. And yes, when I dumped the DB from meyerweb, I did it so that it contained the CREATE and USE directives at the top of the dump file. They don’t seem to make any difference at all.

Plus all that was after I reinstalled MySQL about seventeen times because it refused to start up even though the installation was supposed to be point-and-click. Eventually I switched to a different, third-party install package, and it went like a charm. Serves me right, I suppose, for assuming that the MySQL.com folks could put together an install package that actually works. At this point, as far as I’m concerned, MySQL is the rotted corpses of the maggots that once infested the corn inside a pile of moose droppings.

Not that I’m bitter that this wasted four hours of my life or anything.

The other project is, of course, S5. It’s currently stuck at 1.1b5, because there’s this problem in Firefox for Windows that I simply cannot figure out. I commented on it a little over a month ago; the basic problem is that when viewing the testbed slide show in Firefox for Windows, it seems to “jiggle”, apparently from constant re-scaling of the fonts. I can’t figure out how to stop it.

So any ideas, anyone? At this stage, that’s pretty much the last major problem before going final. Safari still blocks use of Page Up and Page Down when in the outline view, but that’s something I can live with. The nervous-twitch display in Firefox for Windows isn’t acceptable in a non-beta version.

I’ll still be using S5 1.1b5 for my SXSW presentations, but that’s okay because I’ll be using Firefox for Macintosh, which doesn’t appear to suffer from the same problem. If it does start having problems, I’ll just switch to Safari. No big deal.

Anyway, that’s where things stand on those two projects. Hopefully I’ll get over the roadblocks soon, and be able to get them moving again.

Michael Duff wrote in to say...

Unless I’m missing something, mysqlimport isn’t what you want here. It’s job is to load a single table from a text (CSV, etc.) file, using a table name based on the ‘base name’ of the file — as you’re seeing.

If you’re working from a mysqldump output, Jonas’s advice should be dead-on.

Same here – no jiggling in FF1.01 running under Windows XP, 1.0PR running on a Win2003 server or 0.9.3 running on Win98SE – I’ll check with Win2000 when I get home.

I also use PHPMyAdmin and have successfully imported SQL (INSERT statements to recreate a database) using it’s SQL text file importing facility. The only minor caveat is that it will won’t import files larger than 2048KB at a time.

You nailed it, Jonas. Now, if only the documentation had shared that little tidbit in the “import” pages.

As for the jiggling, or lack thereof, now I’m feeling really frustrated. I definitely see it in my Windows 2000 Professional copy of Virtual PC, running FF 1.0. Anyone able to trigger it by resizing the browser window?

Michael Duff wrote in to say...

Could it be that VPC’s message queue is handling the re-draw events differently than Windows normally would? I’m speculating that the VPC must generate messages for OS X in response to, or based on, the messages that the virtual Win2K one running under it generates. Does this only happen on a resize or can it be coerced into happening constantly?

The problem is due to a rounding error I believe; it disappeared for me in my tests when I defined the size of fonts and linespacing in pixels, e.g. “font: 12px/16px sans-serif” or similar. Also, it occurred with much greater frequency when I combined with alpha opacity fading effects; this was in my FreeStyle Menu script, which has subsequently had its example font sizes defined in pixels and fading animation disabled by default. No more problem.

So perhaps adjust your element sizing code to parseInt() its results and assign as pixels to the document. That should cure the problem!

P.S. How’s the background PNG opacity behavior going? Did you ever get a chance to try that out? I posted a few times to the previous thread and emailed you once or twice to no avail.

Chris Nelson wrote in to say...

WindowsXP, 1280×1024, FF 1.01

No jiggling when the window is fullscreen, but a thin blue horizontal lazerline in the control area darkens/brightens

But if I resize the window, I start getting a noticable jiggling of that same line, vibrating up and down as I move the mouse in the control area. When I resize again to fullscreen, the lazerline maintains this up/down jiggling.

Question: why is the lazerline there? It’s the only visual anomaly that I could find…

John wrote in to say...

Just out of curiosity, have you tried doing a full, manual clean-up of mysql from your system? Mysql uninstalls can leave rogue db files on your hard disk. I once had many issues with mysql after an upgrade…The first thing I did was completely remove all references to it. Then I reinstalled the same version, and copied the db folders over manually…just a drag and drop…and was happily accessing my db as before.

I also ran into a permissions issue….where newest version of mysql used a different authentication type & my password didn’t work…

Casey wrote in to say...

MySQL Administrator may solve your problems, though I’m not sure if there’s a version of OS-X, so you may need a spare windows/Linux box. Or, you should be able to do it using the Virtual PC. Anyway, you can do backups and restores with the tool. I’ve never had a problem with it, so it should work.

I use CocoaMySQL, which is a nice interface to MySQL. The problem is that I didn’t use it before upgrading, since I had the crazy idea that the databases would survive an upgrade of the software. C’est la mort.

I did do a manual clean of the MySQL directories in /usr/local/ which is where the MySQL.com package installs stuff. The problem I kept hitting was that the data directory was unwritable, which meant the initialization routines failed. When I fiddled with the permissions on the data directory, things just got worse. The socket would randomly fire up, but even when it did, I couldn’t get the daemon to come up. Use of the preference pane just seemed to make things worse; it would claim the process was running when I knew damned well it wasn’t, thanks to Activity Monitor.

So I hunted around, found the Complete MySQL 4.0.21 package from Server Logistics, which installed smoothly. It isn’t quite as up to date as the 4.1.10 package I was trying to install from MySQL.com, but I’ll take old and works over new and b0rked any day of the year.

It’s possible that I missed some files scattered around the hard drive, but since these packages don’t seem to come with UNinstall packages, it’s hard to be sure.

At this point, though, I don’t really care: I have an apparently stable MySQL installation, and thanks to comments I successfully imported the database, so I was able to test my update script last night and am ready to kick GK RC2 out the door.

XP SP2 Firefox 1.0.1 + Adblock no jiggles – even on resizing.
There was a very minor flicker on the popup slide controler when you move from the next/forward buttons to the dropdown and vice versa. Maybe a spacer image link (to “#”) between them (rather than margins) would stop this?

I did have the problem that the return key gets ‘hijacked’ which prevents me from browsing away from the slideshow (i.e. I type a URI, press return and it does not take me there). This only occurs when Adblock is enabled. An object focus conflict maybe?

I just read about your problems with importing a mysqldump file and if you happen to have access to Paul DuBois’ book “MySQL Cookbook” you will find on page 467 a discussion about NOT using mysqlimport on dump files. You should use a command like
‘mysql [database]

Isaac Lin wrote in to say...

Eric,

I am trying out the v11b5 version of S5 and noticed some odd behaviour. You can see two test versions I created to illustrate the oddities, both the same except that one uses the default theme, and another uses the i18n theme:

The first problem is perhaps an unexpected case, where the first slide has an incremental list. The entire list is displayed immediately, though the “next” key still pages through each item.

The second problem occurs when an incremental list is the last slide in the presentation. After reaching the last item, pressing the “next” key starts displaying the same page from the beginning again, incrementally displaying each list items.

On a different note, Lachlan Hunt’s most recent blog entry alluded to future changes in progress for S5, restructuring it to make it easy to extend. Can you comment on a roadmap for S5, if any exists? I am interested in enhancing S5 to better separate out themes; if the work is already underway then I would like to know.

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